Re: i18n Polyglot Markup/NCRs (7th issue)

On 2010/07/20 18:23, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Jul 19, 2010, at 19:01, Phillips, Addison wrote:
>
>> The comment was on specific text in the document that used a decimal NCR instead of a hex NCR. It's a editorial comment, but it would be best to make the change, in my opinion. If the W3C just ignores its own advice in writing documents, why would document authors pay attention to it?
>
> I'm inclined to think that the right fix is making the next editions of the existing W3C i18n advice that prefers hex over decimal not to particularly prefer either one over the other.

There's a good reason why hex should be preferred over decimal. Unicode 
code tables (as well as most other character encoding tables these days; 
that used to be different 20 or 30 years ago) are all in hex. It's a 
pain to look up a character with a code table, but it's quite a bit more 
of a pain to look up a character with at code table and a hex<->dec 
conversion calculator. Of course, this is no difference for a machine, 
but it's a difference for us humans. And the reason NCRs are still used 
in UTF-8 and UTF-16 are humans, not machines.

So I don't see why the I18N advice should be changed. And I don't see 
why the example in the polyglot document can't be changed.

Regards,    Martin.

-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp

Received on Tuesday, 20 July 2010 09:51:24 UTC